About

The ADHO Special Interest Group for Interactive Digital Narratives (SIG_IDN) is a forum for scholars, educators, archivists, designers, technologists and creative practitioners working on interactive and computationally mediated narrative.

Our mission

SIG_IDN advances research, teaching, critical discussion and public-facing dissemination relating to interactive and computational narrative. We aim to be an international hub for the study of narratives shaped by reader or player agency, algorithmic processes, interface structures and evolving digital platforms, and a community where theory, method, technical practice and interpretation inform one another across disciplines and languages.

The field covers electronic literature, digital fiction, interactive documentary, narrative games, locative and pervasive storytelling, XR and VR narrative environments, multilinear and database narratives, and procedural or AI-driven narrative systems.

Why a SIG at ADHO

The questions are already central to digital humanities

Textuality beyond the codex, multimodality, platform studies, interface criticism, archival futures, immersive media and machine-generated culture are all live debates, but scholars often meet them under adjacent labels rather than a common framework.

The practical problems need collective work

Describing and classifying interactive works, documenting versioned and platform-dependent artefacts, agreeing standards for metadata and citation, teaching the field, and preserving works that depend on obsolete software, proprietary engines or embodied interaction are all easier together.

The field is international and multilingual

Interactive narrative spans many languages, storytelling traditions and media ecologies, which suits ADHO’s scope and its Constituent Organizations.

Objectives

• Build an international community focused on interactive digital narratives across digital humanities, media studies, game studies, HCI, computational narrative research and related fields.
• Develop shared concepts, vocabularies and methods for analysing interactive, multilinear, procedural, immersive and AI-mediated narrative.
• Exchange tools, datasets, workflows, metadata practices and preservation strategies for born-digital and interactive works.
• Create and circulate teaching resources that build digital literacy through interactive digital narratives, in education and in public settings.
• Collaborate on workshops, conference panels, publications, grant applications and edited volumes.
• Offer mentoring and networking, especially for early-career scholars, postgraduate researchers and practitioner-scholars.
• Advocate for accessibility, preservation, documentation and multilingual dissemination.

Initial steering committee

The steering committee guides the SIG through its founding period. Members will be invited to a short-term Governance Committee to propose how future leadership, participation and committees work, and to volunteer for subcommittees on conference programming, resources, pedagogy, preservation, communications and mentorship.

Our first two years

SIG_IDN is a Special Interest Group of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, and runs on the voluntary contributions of its members. All communications and events follow ADHO’s communications and conduct policies. See the SIG’s page on the ADHO website.